Aleister Crowley

Crowley biographer Martin Booth asserted that Crowley was "self-confident, brash, eccentric, egotistic, highly intelligent, arrogant, witty, wealthy, and, when it suited him, cruel". Similarly, Richard Spence noted that Crowley was "capable of immense physical and emotional cruelty". Biographer Lawrence Sutin noted that Crowley exhibited "courage, skill, dauntless energy, and remarkable focus of will" while at the same time showing a "blind arrogance, petty fits of bile, [and] contempt for the abilities of his fellow men". The Thelemite Lon Milo DuQuette noted that Crowley "was by no means perfect" and "often alienated those who loved him dearest."

Crowley enjoyed being outrageous and flouting conventional morality, with John Symonds noting that he "was in revolt against the moral and religious values of his time". Crowley's political thought was subjected to an in-depth study by academic Marco Pasi, who noted that for Crowley, socio-political concerns were subordinate to metaphysical and spiritual ones. Pasi argued that it was difficult to classify Crowley as being either on the political left or right, but he was perhaps best categorised as a "conservative revolutionary" despite not being affiliated with the German-based conservative revolutionary movement. Pasi noted that Crowley sympathised with extreme ideologies like Nazism and Marxism-Leninism, in that they wished to violently overturn society, and hoped that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union might adopt Thelema. Crowley described democracy as an "imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness", and commented that The Book of the Law proclaimed that "there is the master and there is the slave; the noble and the serf; the 'lone wolf' and the herd". In this attitude he was influenced by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and by Social Darwinism. Crowley also saw himself as an aristocrat, describing himself as Laird Boleskine; he had contempt for most of the British aristocracy, and once described his ideology as "aristocratic communism".

Crowley was bisexual, and exhibited a sexual preference for women. In particular he had an attraction toward "exotic women", and claimed to have fallen in love on multiple occasions; Kaczynski stated that "when he loved, he did so with his whole being, but the passion was typically short-lived". Even in later life, he was able to attract young bohemian women to be his lovers, largely due to his charisma. During same-sex anal intercourse, he usually played the passive role, which Booth believed "appealed to his masochistic side". Crowley argued that gay and bisexual people should not suppress their sexual orientation, commenting that a person "must not be ashamed or afraid of being homosexual if he happens to be so at heart; he must not attempt to violate his own true nature because of public opinion, or medieval morality, or religious prejudice which would wish he were otherwise." On other issues he adopted a more conservative attitude; he opposed abortion on moral grounds, believing that no woman following her True Will would ever desire one.

Biographer Lawrence Sutin stated that "blatant bigotry is a persistent minor element in Crowley's writings". Sutin thought Crowley "a spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper-class contemporaries", noting that he "embodied the contradiction that writhed within many Western intellectuals of the time: deeply held racist viewpoints courtesy of their culture, coupled with a fascination with people of colour". Crowley insulted his close Jewish friend Victor Neuburg using anti-Semitic slurs, and he had mixed opinions about Jews as a group. Although he praised their "sublime" poetry and claimed that the "Jewish race" contained "imagination, romance, loyalty, probity and humanity in an exceptional degree", he also thought that centuries of persecution had led some Jews to exhibit "avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest". He was also known to praise various ethnic and cultural groups, for instance he claimed that the Chinese people exhibited a "spiritual superiority" to the English, and praised Muslims for exhibiting "manliness, straightforwardness, subtlety, and self-respect".

Crowley also exhibited a "general misogyny" that Booth believed arose from his bad relationship with his mother. Sutin noted that Crowley "largely accepted the notion, implicitly embodied in Victorian sexology, of women as secondary social beings in terms of intellect and sensibility". Crowley described women as "moral inferiors" who had to be treated with "firmness, kindness and justice".

There is one ENTJ in this forum who keeps meassuring all ENTjs according to himself. That is he thinks that all the desries and problems he has are in fact shared my all ENTJs. If he were to know what I know about the true nature of types and how broad they really are, he would easily see how petty and specific his personal problems really are. To enlighten other people about ENTjs here is a very curious ENTJ that I came accross in one of the books I read recently. Oddle enough this guy figured prominently in a cultural history of the tank, in fact his occult thoeries might well have been the fountainhead from where Blitzzkrieg originated.

Crowley was fueled chiefly by rebellion against childhood Christianity, which he resented. Te abhors rebellion. Te is about conforming to systems. I doubt LIE ENTj.

I've also heard IEE and LSI for him--both rebellious by nature, but conflictors. There are a lot of historical people who are too often typed as LSI by one party and IEE by another even though they conflict, because of similar traits they can possess. I might have to think about that one.

Crowley was fueled chiefly by rebellion against childhood Christianity, which he resented. Te abhors rebellion. Te is about conforming to systems. I doubt LIE ENTj.

Te is not the conformity function and it has never been said that Te is about conforming to systems. Aristocrats can have that collectivist conformity attitude but that obviously applies to both Beta and Delta, logical and ethical.

Anyway, EIE is the obvious typing for Crowley since he was a religious leader, but I really doubt he was and EIE. Plus Beta NF is way overtyped on this forum. I honestly doubt he was ethical at all. Probably logical for sure and I'd guess extraverted since he put himself in the limelight so much. I don't see much wrong with the LIE typing.

I get a H i t l e r vibe from him, not because they're both seen as wicked and evil by the world, they both share an occultic fanaticism, both studied alone to master their obsessions, highly intelligent, both claimed to have communicated with aliens, both were charismatic womanizers, "cult leader" types.

ILE. If you read his works, Ti and Ne are everywhere (example:http://www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no1/eqi01012.html) He advocated for a scientific approach to magic, using strict documentation, as if it was a scientific experiment. As well, his cruelty and his hatred for traditional morality is evidence of Fi-PoLR.

He's clearly got an expansive cognition. The associations between the church of Crowley and his actual experiences are so loose and remote that we can clearly deduce the "what is" never "is" for Crowley. He lived in an orgy of possibility. He creates his own universe from scratch. Experiences are just sacrifices to the esoteric, bringing him closer to what will be his big picture grandiose vision. It just so happens he was drawn to the occult like an ILE spaceship inventor was drawn to astronauts and out of space. Raw external intuition can look like paranoid schizophrenia when it gets out of control.

ILE esoteric leaders with Ti subtypes tend to develop a fully functional school of thought around their cognition - Ti subtype provides an ability to collect and organize the intuitions in a way that would continue on after death in the form of ritualization, whereas ILE esoteric leaders with Ne subtypes leave things in more disarray, making it harder for others to piece together their entire body of thought.

As for his enneagram type, I agree that the motivation for type 7 is subversion, but 8w7 makes more sense. Ne-dom is also a subversive function because it inevitably rearranges reality, so that makes his 7 wing appear even more subversive. 8 and 7 are also both aggressive/expansive types. So when 8w7 combines with ILE, you get an ILE whose intuitions are more aggressive in its violence-towards-reality and more expansive in terms of how much reality it wants to rearrange. For Crowley, it was the entire universe.

He's clearly got an expansive cognition. The associations between the church of Crowley and his actual experiences are so loose and remote that we can clearly deduce the "what is" never "is" for Crowley. He lived in an orgy of possibility. He creates his own universe from scratch. Experiences are just sacrifices to the esoteric, bringing him closer to what will be his big picture grandiose vision. It just so happens he was drawn to the occult like an ILE spaceship inventor was drawn to astronauts and out of space. Raw external intuition can look like paranoid schizophrenia when it gets out of control.

ILE esoteric leaders with Ti subtypes tend to develop a fully functional school of thought around their cognition - Ti subtype provides an ability to collect and organize the intuitions in a way that would continue on after death in the form of ritualization, whereas ILE esoteric leaders with Ne subtypes leave things in more disarray, making it harder for others to piece together their entire body of thought.

As for his enneagram type, I agree that the motivation for type 7 is subversion, but 8w7 makes more sense. Ne-dom is also a subversive function because it inevitably rearranges reality, so that makes his 7 wing appear even more subversive. 8 and 7 are also both aggressive/expansive types. So when 8w7 combines with ILE, you get an ILE whose intuitions are more aggressive in its violence-towards-reality and more expansive in terms of how much reality it wants to rearrange. For Crowley, it was the entire universe.

To the bolded - wasn't that actually more the case with Crowley? He left his body of though kind of scattered throughout his works, without any kind of real structure behind Thelema. He did leave certain structures in the form of OTO, which was basically a Masonic order he took and turned into a vehicle for Thelema. So the structure itself preexisted him. His A:A: for example became a mess in itself without anybody really able to trace things back to authentic lineages founded by Crowley and bogus ones.

For the record I am seeing how ILE works for Crowley. He did have an expansive congition which would indicate a preference for Ne over Ni, which contracts more in the realm of ideas.

To the bolded - wasn't that actually more the case with Crowley? He left his body of though kind of scattered throughout his works, without any kind of real structure behind Thelema. He did leave certain structures in the form of OTO, which was basically a Masonic order he took and turned into a vehicle for Thelema. So the structure itself preexisted him. His A:A: for example became a mess in itself without anybody really able to trace things back to authentic lineages founded by Crowley and bogus ones.

For the record I am seeing how ILE works for Crowley. He did have an expansive congition which would indicate a preference for Ne over Ni, which contracts more in the realm of ideas.

Fair point. This is some stuff I came across:

"Within the year, Crowley had written the Manifesto of the M∴M∴M∴ which described its basic ten-degree system with Kellner’s three degree Academia Masonica forming the seventh, eighth and ninth degrees.

In 1913, Crowley composed the Gnostic Mass while in Moscow, which he described as being the Order’s "central ceremony of its public and private celebration".[7] In 1914, soon after World War I broke out, he moved to the United States. It was around this time that Crowley decided to integrate Thelema into the O.T.O. system, and in 1915 prepared revised rituals for use in the M∴M∴M∴."

"After Crowley's death Germer attempted to keep O.T.O. running, with questionable success. Crowley had granted a charter to run an O.T.O. Camp in England to Gerald Gardner, and Germer acknowledged Gardner as the O.T.O.'s main representative in Europe. The two men met in 1948 in New York to discuss plans, but Gardner's continuing ill health led to Germer replacing him with Frederic Mellinger in 1951. Also in 1951 Germer granted a charter to run an O.T.O. Camp in England to Kenneth Grant, who had briefly served as Crowley's secretary during the 1940s."

the structure section reads like the set-up of a religion. I think he must have found it important to institutionalize Thelema inside institutions that would outlive him. I also read that Crowley put an emphasis on position and title. He had an easy time rising in leadership for the organizations he joined. There's an interest in formal process with all the ceremonies and rituals. I see him to the Occult world as the equivalent to like somebody who holds high political office. I think he had to have been methodical in a way that Ne-subtypes are not in order to accomplish that. Overall, just smells more Ti-subtype to me.

Diving into own mind is not very ILE. They externalize it (therefore socionics is acceptable hobby for them). Ignoring stuff.
Does not end up in systematized structure.

See how socionics was put together. You can spot it in one paragraph from Psychological types.

extrospection > introspectionHead type as in being truly head type and probably 7>5. Too divergent, scattered and expressive for typical 5 and that is the preferred way although long term focus usually helps.